Seasons of digital change measured in ag growth online

By Gary L. West
Associate editor, Capital Press

I took last week off. But if I had truly wanted a vacation from agriculture news and information, I went about it all wrong.

I spent most of the week visiting family in Oregon's Umatilla County, smack dab in the middle of farming country, where many of the recent headlines we have printed in Capital Press and posted on CapitalPress.com were affecting my family and a wide swath of the countryside.

For example, the cool, wet spring had crops behind. It was common to see alfalfa fields with windrows of hay on the ground turning brown because the rains wouldn't stop long enough to bale the hay. Some fields had standing water in them from recent flooding of streams like Butter Creek.

There was talk about Hermiston's trademark watermelon crop would be several week's later than the Fourth of July holiday, leaving a short season for growers. And in the dryland areas were large fields of wheat afflicted with stripe rust, giving the grain a golden tint long before it is ripening for harvest.

My dad and cousin work in businesses connected to spraying farm crops for insects, weeds and diseases like stripe rust. My dad attacks the harvest robbing threats from the air. My cousin attacks them on the ground. And conversations with both of them centered on issues like this season's unique challenges, taxes, fees, regulations and just the physically exhausting nature of the work.

Of course, they both took advantage of my presence to get a little work out of me too. For my dad, I shot some photos of his planes at work. For my cousin, I wound up helping him move equipment from job site to job site a few times, and helped him change the massive tires on his ground sprayer one day.

I have to admit, it felt good to be outdoors for several days, enjoying some warmer temperatures than the Willamette Valley had experiences so far this spring. It also felt good to be out taking photos again. It even felt good to be exercising some muscles I don't ordinarily use when sitting at a desk all day in the Capital Press office in Salem.

The timing was interesting too. Because this week marks the anniversary of my start date at the Capital Press. It was 6 years ago today that I came to work here. That vacation vividly illustrated to me how my early life growing up in the country and professional life as a journalist, which once took very divergent paths, have come together.

This anniversary is special, in that it now marks the longest tenure I've spent with any media organization in my 20-plus year career. I've spent some time looking back at my time here too as this anniversary has approached, which led me back to this blog. Nearly 6 years ago, when this blog started, it was a way I could work around some of the shortcomings of our website software. At the time, it was somewhat unusual for an organization connected to production agriculture to be blogging. In one of the earliest posts on this blog, I asked the question: Do farmers blog? In 2005, the answer to that was that a few did, but not many. It was difficult to come up with even a handful of agriculture blogs back then. Now, there are lots of farmers who blog, and/or tweet, and/or have a Facebook page or YouTube account and use a variety of Internet tools to tell their story, connect with business associates or people that eat what they grow. Today, we follow more than 3,000 people on Twitter, the majority of which are posts by or about agriculture topics and we have more than 3,700 following our main Twitter account, plus more than 2,700 fans on our main Facebook page. Today we have several blogs, are about to launch a new podcast, multiple Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, a YouTube channel where we post 5 video news updates a week and other videos related to our stories, and a growing group of websites. And agriculture's use of smart phones and online services have exploded behind the efforts of groups like the AgChat Foundation.

That's pretty dramatic change and growth in just 6 seasons.

Thanks for sharing part of this journey with us. And thank you to the past and current staff of the Capital Press and East Oregonian Publishing Co. for letting me, and others on staff here and at our sister publications, push the edge of that envelope a bit for the last 6 years.

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You can follow Capital Press on Twitter @capitalpress or follow Gary's behind-the-scenes tweets at @CapitalPressglw or connect with Capital Press on Facebook or connect with Gary on Facebook.

Time has escaped from the bottle

Where has the time gone? June 13 marks my 4th anniversary at the Capital Press, but in many ways if feels like I just got here.

Perhaps that is because the Capital Press, our parent company the East Oregonian Publishing Co., and some of our sister papers are fortunate to have some staff members with long tenure. It's not unusual to have people stick around these parts for 10, 15, 20 years or more.

When I started working at the Capital Press in June 2005, it was something of a homecoming. I had worked at East Oregonian during vacations from college and joined the staff at the Pendleton-based daily in the Hermiston, Ore., bureau as my second job after college. When I first started working in the newsroom's photo lab in the summer of 1985, Mike Forrester was the editor-in-chief at the East Oregonian. He later become editor and then publisher of the Capital Press. Although he retired shortly before I came to the Capital Press, he still stops by from time to time as chairman of the Capital Press board and one of the owners of the company. I was seeing familiar faces from my first day of work at the Capital Press.

It doesn't feel like 24 years since I collected my first paycheck for this company and it certainly doesn't feel like 4 years since I got here. The only way I can quantify the passage of that time was that my daughter, who was born when I was in East Oregonian reporter back in 1991, is now 18. About the time I started my job as associate editor for the Capital Press I also attended her 8th grade graduation. Now, this month, she earned her high school diploma.

There is another obvious sign of the passage of time since my early days with the company. There is a black-and-white photo hanging on my office wall of me and four other photographers who were covering the Pendleton Round-Up in one of those summer/fall periods at the EO in the mid to late 1980s. The people who stop by my office and look at that picture don't seem to notice that I'm one of the people in it. And if I tell them I'm in the photo they usually can't tell which guy is me.

Well, the picture is black-and-white and it was taken a few years, and more than a few pounds, ago.

Still, there is some comfort in marking the passage of time, the changing of seasons, on familiar ground. So much changes and yet much remains the same.

I wish to thank my family and many friends for welcoming me back home in the summer 2005 and sharing so many special occasions with me these last four years. I look forward to many more special times.

I also wish to thank the Capital Press and East Oregonian Publishing Co. families who have extended so many professional opportunities to me over the years. I have gained a lot of experience and understanding of journalism and agriculture in the newsrooms of the East Oregonian, Hermiston Herald and the Capital Press. I also appreciate my colleagues and coworkers who have been receptive to the things I've suggested here based on things learned in other newsrooms and communities in the West.

And I also offer my thanks to all of you who stop in here at Blogriculture to check out what we have posted here. I've learned so much from the comments and interactions with my fellow bloggers too.

Four years. Wow. I can't believe how quickly the time has passed.

Oh, and if you are looking for anniversary gift ideas, the traditional fourth anniversary gift is fruit or flowers (I prefer fruit). The contemporary fourth anniversary gift is supposedly electrical appliances (and my iPod is showing it's age). Or is this my 24th anniversary? Funny, there is not traditional gift suggest for a 24th anniversary, according to my online website resources, but the modern gift suggestion is musical instruments. I have forgotten all I ever knew about playing the saxophone and I don't really have room for a piano, but I think the ever-musical iPod idea would still work.

OK, so I won't hold my breath waiting for the gifts.

A summer/fall vacation

I'm back from a week's vacation, which probably sounds pretty strange to people who work in agriculture. This is the the busy time of year for most people in agriculture. A summer vacation for a farmer or agriculture business in the northern hemisphere is pretty much impossible.

Frankly, that's one reason I didn't go to work for my dad in his aerial application (i.e. crop dusting) business. When I worked for my dad in my late teens, it was just impossible to plan anything with friends because you just didn't know when you would be able to get away from work. Evening events were out, even though we didn't work after dark, because we were always up and at it before it was light each morning to get the airplanes fueled and head out to remote airstrips to work in the calm conditions after dawn. We often stopped work in the middle of the day, as the rising temperatures were often accompanied by wind, making it impossible to spray.

But that didn't mean we were done working for the day. There was always work to do, like servicing equipment and cleaning. Oh, how I hated the cleaning. And it seemed there was always something to clean. If it wasn't washing airplanes, pickups or other service vehicles, then there was always the shop floor to clean. Then, as sunset approached, the winds would calm down, and it was back to spraying again until twilight.

Even on days when we woke up to windy conditions you could never venture too far on the off chance conditions improved later in the day. So, some days we did get days off, but you didn't necessarily know it would be a full day off until the day was done and you hadn't worked.

I didn't like the unpredictability of that sort of schedule. So, instead, I ventured into newspapers, where you work a specific schedule but cover unpredictable events. It seemed a good compromise. Oh, sure, sometimes those unpredictable events have meant canceled plans, like on Sept. 11, 2001, I had been on vacation that week, but got called in to work as the nation and the world tried to come to grips with, and the media tried to cover, the stunning enormity of the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington, D.C., and the airline industry.

Agriculture businesses, like my father's, have changed a lot since I was making my career choices. There is a lot more regulation and oversight of things like work schedules, moving the industry closer too general society's "norms." Who knows, maybe if I were making my career choice today I would choose a different path. But, as the saying goes, you have to make hay while the sun shines and in agriculture, you work with the growing seasons and the weather permit it, and you take time off to recreate in the off season.

Best assignment ever

I gave Capital Press intern-for-the-day Suzanna Schuck an assignment to write a blog post about her experience covering a story for a newspaper and being published online on a newspaper’s website. After some thought, I decided to give myself the same assignment. So here is my post about my impressions of working with our intern for the day.

When the day started – Friday, Aug. 3, 2007 – I was excited about heading to Portland to cover an event where produce grown by farmers in Hermiston, Ore., was being handed out -- including world famous Hermiston watermelons -- to folks in downtown.

It was exciting for many reasons. One is that I normally fly a desk in my job and don't get out of the office to cover stories very often. Normally that's just fine by me. Although I started out as a photographer and became a writer/reporter, I hung up my camera and notepad long ago to do the behind-the-scenes work. It was hard at first, but I grew to enjoy it. But every now and then it's nice to see if I can still think on my feet when out in the field.

As for coverage of Friday's event, I decided I was going to try something that is new for me, which is shooting video. So I played the role of multimedia reporter, shooting moving pictures and recording sounds.

But I knew my little experiment could be a complete bust if I messed up with the video camera or the digital audio recorder. Fortunately, I was able to find someone to help me out -- the Capital Press intern for the day, Suzanna Schuck.

That's what made the day especially exciting for me, because Suzanna is also my daughter. And this was our first opportunity to work together in an area where we have shared interests -- writing and media.

On this day I turned the notebook and still digital camera over to Suzanna.

We arrived on-scene for our assignment at 11 a.m., about an hour before the scheduled start. The watermelons, potatoes and cantaloupes were all gone by 1 p.m. And after a return to our "field office" and brief pause for lunch, Suzanna set to work writing her story. She and I reviewed some of the audio I had recorded to choose quotes to include in her story. And after a final edit, the story it was posted shortly before 4:30.

Most people who know Capital Press know it as a printed newspaper, which comes out on Fridays. So, ordinarily, covering an event on a Friday would mean that story can't get out to readers until the following Friday. But Suzanna was able to get a story covered and written before some of our print readers probably even had a chance to read the story previewing the event in the newspaper that was waiting for them in their mailbox -- if the U.S. Postal Service managed to get it to them Friday.

Suzanna has also been assigned to write a blog post about her experience and I admit I will be anxious to read what she has to say. I know she’s been working on it, but it isn’t quite a done deal yet. But speaking only for myself and my experience, it was a particularly poignant day. It was a day that gave me a glimpse at the past. Several of the people Suzanna and I talked to Friday were people I used to cover back in the early 1990s as a reporter for the East Oregonian and editor of the Hermiston Herald. The one and only other time I ever covered the Hermiston watermelon giveaway in Portland was back in those days.

Back then in 1992, Frank Harkenrider, who was there in the square Friday, was mayor of Hermiston, and DuWayne White, who hauled a pickup load of produce for this year’s event and helped with the distribution, was on the city council all those years ago. I believe, and my memory may be a bit faulty on the timing for this, but I believe the current mayor, Bob Severson, who served as master of ceremonies Friday, and current councilman Rod Hardin, who was also there, were on the city's planning commission back them.

And Suzanna was barely a year old.

I got to see some of the future as well. I met three young farmers who are fourth-generation watermelon growers -- Brianna, Christie and Chandi Walker who farm near Stanfield -- who are proudly carrying on their family's tradition.

And I saw some of the future of media as well, as journalists, regardless of their primary medium, were covering the event, like Suzanna and I were, with a variety of tools to capture words, photographs, sound and video.

A lot has changed since Frank Harkenrider and some folks from Hermiston starting what is now a tradition of hauling produce to Portland every summer. People have changed hats and changed roles. New people have come onto the scene and new generations have taken more active roles. Children have grown. Time has marched on.

I was glad to see first-hand that the tradition of giving away Hermiston produce has continued and grown over the years. But mostly I feel fortunate to be able to have shared some of my chosen profession with Suzanna.

For many years, our time together was limited because my chosen vocation took me far from home and family. That's one "tradition" I am happy to say has been put to rest. On Friday, what I do for a living and the Eastern Oregon roots Suzanna and I share, gave us a chance to work together and collaborate on a story about people giving to others. We saw lots of smiling faces as hundreds of people, perhaps more than a thousand, got a gift from the good farmers and folks of Umatilla County.

But I feel like I got the biggest give of all. A day sharing what I love with the person I love most in this world.

And Suzanna, thanks for your help. You did a great job. Of course my opinion is biased. As much as I worked with Suzanna on her story as an editor, the part of me that is a proud father far overwhelmed any journalistic objectivity I tried to maintain about her final work. In the end, I turned over her story and photographs to the other editors on the Capital Press staff to decide what, if anything, to do with them for any of our print editions.

Suzanna’s story and photographs appeared in two of the four editions of Capital Press for Aug. 10, 2007 – the two that circulate in Oregon. I also got a call from the publisher of our sister paper, the East Oregonian in Pendleton, who saw the photos we posted online. He wanted to know if he could use a Capital Press photo in a column he is planning for the weekend – one of Suzanna’s photos.

Knowing that Suzanna’s work was about to be published in a print newspaper reminded me of the first time I had my work published, which happened when I was in high school in Eastern Oregon. I got to know the sports editor of the local weekly paper, the Hermiston Herald, when we were both taking photographs at sports events – he for his paper and me for my high school’s yearbook. The sports editor, Bill Bighaus, was planning to do a story on two tennis players from my school, but he didn’t have a photo of them playing. He asked if I had any pictures of them, which I did. He published my first photograph several days later. It was the spring of my senior year in high school and I was 18.

Now Suzanna will experience that same rush of pride at seeing her name in print in a “real” newspaper for the first time. But it will not just be one photo, it will be several. And a story. And her work will appear in three editions of two newspapers and on at least two different websites. All that at age 16 in the summer before her junior year in high school. She bested the old man by a mile and by nearly two years. And I couldn’t be more proud to be shown up by my daughter.

That’s not to say I hope she will, nor would necessarily want her to, pursue what has been my career and turn this news thing into a family tradition. There are better paying fields out there for someone with the talents she has and is developing. But I am very happy that we got a chance to work together and be brought together by interests that at one time, when they were only my interests, contributed to keeping us apart. Fortunately a couple of years ago I was able to find a job that will allow me to do what I do a lot closer to where she lives that gives us the opportunity to spend more time together and see each other more often. And on Friday, Aug. 3, it also gave me the opportunity to work with her, try to teach her a few things and in return learn so much more about her and her interests and talents.

It all made for one of the best days I’ve ever had working and one of the proudest days I’ve ever had as a parent. Through my chosen vocation I have met a former president, covered presidential candidates, interviewed and photographed politicians, captains of industry and celebrities. I've covered Pac-10 athletics, professional rodeo and NBA basketball. But no assignment means more to me than the one I covered with my daughter and for which she got the byline and photo credits. Thanks for working with me, Suzanna. I had a great time.

Moving forward offers chance to look back

Where were you on April 12, 1995?

I couldn't have answered that question until yesterday. Oh sure, I could have told you were I was living and working at the time, but what I was doing on that day? Not a chance. I have trouble remembering what I did last week. But yesterday I got a reminder of just exactly where I was and what I was doing on that date.

I was wearing body armor and a Kevlar helmet and watching the U.S. Army shoot off their big guns in the Mojave Desert.

I got the reminder thanks to a new tool that we will soon be utilizing here at Capital Press. The Capital Press has joined the Associated Press news cooperative and will have access to more AP stories and photographs. We've already started utilizing the story access for updating our website and getting more timely information into our print edition. Today we got the photo service fully operational. And it's that photo service that reminded me of where I was 12 years ago on that April day.

I was playing around with the search tool we will use to access the AP photo database, plugging in different search terms like agriculture and farming and ranching and looking for various types of livestock. That worked pretty well, so I kept playing. The database is also searchable by things like the name of the photographer too. So I did some searches using the names of friends and colleagues I've worked with over the years at various newspapers. I was, once upon a time, even paid to take photographs for newspaper and have had some photos make the AP wires over the years. So I did a search for my own name, not expecting to find anything, but one image did pop up.

The picture was one I took back in my first month as photo editor of a paper called the Daily Press in Victoville, Calif. I went to the U.S. Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., outside of Barstow in the Mojave Desert. Defense Secretary William J. Perry was Rep. Jerry Lewis flew into the base on Army helicopters to see part of the live fire exercises going on out in the middle of the desert.
I had forgotten all about covering that event. And I had no memory of the photo being picked up by Associated Press. But here, a thousand miles and a dozen years later, seeing that photo brought back vivid memories of the weapons fire, and the helicopters flying in for the dog-and-pony show with the Secretary of Defense, complete with live ammunition.

We will be using Associated Press photos and stories to augment the Capital Press coverage of agriculture news by our staff members and stable of freelance writers around the West. And perhaps, as AP members, some of our stories and photos may get distributed over the AP network to other media outlets on some occasions.

It's a big day for us here at the Capital Press becoming part of the AP network, all with the goal of providing our readers faster and more comprehensive access to agriculture news. A big day in deed. One worth remembering.

Someone should take a picture to remember it by.

Groundhog Day revolt

The most influential teacher I had when I was a student at Echo High School, Jeanie (Robson) McCoy, used to love Groundhog Day. She used to say it was her favorite holiday.

I don't know if it's still her favorite holiday or not, but I wonder what her reaction would be to a move to rename Groundhog Day in the West to "Prairie Dog Day."

I didn't know there was any big controversy related to Groundhog Day until I got an e-mail from Lauren McCain, deserts and grassland program director for Forest Guardians.

According to the press release McCain sent, Forest Guardians and other conservation organizations have been working for four years to get the prairie dog some props each Feb. 2. The effort is an effort to promote the importance of the prairie dog in the Western ecosystems where it is found.

“Just as the groundhog predicts the duration of winter, the West’s ‘groundhog’ – the prairie dog – foretells the future of a community of wildlife dependent on prairie dogs for food and for the habitat they create,” McCain wrote.

And the effort appears to be gaining some momentum. Forest Guardians report that in 2006 both the Santa Fe, N.M., City Council and mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., officially declared Feb. 2 as Prairie Dog Day.

As a lifelong Westerner, I sort of like the idea of a Western critter getting some recognition, whether on Groundhog Day, or any other day for that matter. I have never seen a groundhog personally, as I suspect many of my neighbors haven't either. But then again, I'm not sure I've ever seen a prairie dog either.

Now, ground squirrels I've seen. I didn't know what a ground squirrel was until one day as a teenager when I was riding dirt bikes with a friend of mine on the farm/ranch he lived on near the Umatilla/Morrow counties line in Eastern Oregon. We were roaring off down some dirt road and came upon this area of rolling hills and grasslands beyond the fringe of the irrigated circles and dryland wheat fields. As I recall it, it was an area used to graze cattle that feature a huge covered concrete water tank (which would later serve as our own private swimming pool out in the middle of nowhere.

As we rode along, there was something odd about the landscape. I couldn't put my finger on it right away, but soon realized we were being watched. As we slowed and eventually stopped I realized that hundreds, no thousands, of little creatures were watching us. Some cautiously poked their heads out of holes in the earth. Others, a bit more distant, stood on all fours near their burrows. And still others, stood up on their hind quarters to eye the pair of noisy interlopers who had invaded their domains. Thousands of ground squirrels dotted the area. As we stopped our motorcycles, and got quiet, the furry little creatures resumed their activities, sprinting about or standing sentry over the rolling hills.

So, after reading about "Prairie Dog Day" I got to thinking, maybe there should be a campaign to have a "Ground Squirrel Day" too. But reflecting on a decade of more than a decade in California, most of that in the deserts there, I realized maybe each region should have it's own burrowing, ground-skittering critter to honor on Feb. 2.

How does "Lizard Day" grab you? Or maybe "Desert Tortoise Day" or "Borrowing Owl Day?"

Move over Punxsutawney Phil and make some room. You've got some competition.

I don't expect a lot of farmers and ranchers will hop on the bandwagon to support recognition or protection of prairie dogs or ground squirrels, animals that can damage crops or compete with livestock for rangeland grasses. What would be next, gophers?

Whether a critter is a loveable icon or a pest is strongly dependent on whether those critters live on your land or some far away place and only make an appearance once a year or so in search of its shadow to give you a prediction on the weather.

Cartoonist responds to criticism, shares memories

I got a note today from Rik Dalvit, a freelance cartoonist whom we regularly feature on the opinion pages of Capital Press. Rik saw the letter we received from Andrew Moore of the National Agricultural Aviation Association about one of his cartoons on ag pilots. Rik shared some of his thoughts with me, and I asked his permission to share those thoughts with you.

Mr. Moore wasn't very happy with the cartoon we published in the Capital Press. If you missed that, I wrote a post about it on our other blog and also posted it on this blog.

Here's Rik's response:

Gary,
I read the letter from Andrew Moore, and your response.

His use of the word "storming" rather than "buzzing" made me wonder if he actually saw the cartoon.

That cartoon remains a favorite of mine, when I did it, I never intended, nor did I think it would offend anyone.

My dad was a pilot, not an ag pilot, but a civilian recreational flier, and I was privileged to spend some incredible time in the air with him and also on the ground, hanging around the small airport where the plane, a surplus Fairchild trainer, he co-owned with a buddy was hangared.

One day we watched a pilot flying a Stearman spraying an orchard, and marvelled at the skill he exhibited.

I have watched ag pilots flying on other occasions, recognize their skill, and respect the work they do.

I have respect and appreciation for everyone in agriculture, an industry which is the foundation of a stable civilization, and prevents the necessity of all of us being wandering hunter gatherers.

I especially like working for Capital Press because of the very readership it serves.

Sincerely,
Rik

I really liked Rik's note and his sharing of the anecdotes about his father. It reminded me of many happy times I spent hanging out at airports and airstrips with my dad as a kid. The memory he shares about seeing a Stearman spraying a field reminded me of my dad and my uncle and the Stearmans they both used to use for spraying.

Dad kept one Stearman for many years, long after he had upgraded his spray planes to more modern and more efficient models. He sometimes talked about taking the spray tank out of it and restoring it to its original two-cockpit configuration. I would have loved that. I never got the chance to ride in an open cockpit plane, even though I was around them a lot in my youth. They'd all been converted to spray planes, with the front seat taken out to make room for a tank to carry ag chemicals.

I wrote a post a while back about how difficult it is to buy gifts for my father. There's only one gift I ever got him where I felt maybe, just maybe, I got it right. I got my dad a print of a painting that showed two Stearman's and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle's in it. The original painting by Stan Stokes is called "Two Ways to Fly." Stokes' work is featured prominently at the Palm Springs Air Museum. I took my dad there once and he seemed to admire Stokes' aviation art.


When I saw the "Two Ways to Fly" print, it reminded me of my dad when he was a younger man. One of my favorite photos of my dad is an old black-and-white picture with him posing with his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. And I have a very fond memory of a ride I once took with my dad on his Harley. I don't know how old I was, but I know I was pretty small. I sat up on the gas tank, with my hand on a center portion of the handlebars. And as I mentioned early, there he did some of his early flying in Stearmans. The ones in the print aren't spray planes, but when I saw that print I saw my dad.

I should have bought one of those prints for myself.

Thanks for sharing, Rik. I enjoyed reading about your memories which sparked some very pleasant ones for me as well.

Technorati tags: Agriculture

So long, Mr. President

He did not serve the nation long in the White House, but he did jobs that needed to be done.

President Gerald R. Ford, who died last night at 93, did the dirty work for a nation. He cleaned up the messes of other presidents and never got the chance to establish his own legacy agenda by serving a full term in office.

I had the honor of meeting President Ford once. I was working for The Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs where Ford and his wife, former first lady Betty Ford, have a home in nearby Rancho Mirage. It was at their Rancho Mirage home where Ford died.

Rancho Mirage is, or was, known as the playground of presidents. President Dwight D. Eisenhower played golf there. The hospital in Rancho Mirage carries his name, Eisenhower Medical Center. That's where the world-famous Betty Ford Center for treating alcohol and drug addiction is located.

John F. Kennedy spent some leisure time in Rancho Mirage as well. As did Ronald Reagan.

But it was Ford who made Rancho Mirage his home after leaving the White House in 1977. Rancho Mirage and the Palm Springs area is one of those rare places where a former president, complete with Secret Service detail, can sort of blend in amid the wealthy captains of industry, former sports athletes, Hollywood celebrities and other famous and infamous types who call the area home. Oh, sure, the area knows they are there, behind the walls of the gated communities and private compounds. And the residents there are proud of their notable residents. They even name streets after them. Gerald Ford, Frank Sinatra, Ginger Rogers, Gene Autry, and Bob Hope, among others, have streets named for them that crisscross the Coachella Valley.

As a journalist I've had opportunities to photograph and interview a few famous people. When I was younger it was the sports athletes I was most interested in, people like Ervin "Magic" Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy, Clyde Drexler, Sean Elliot, Gary Payton. But there was also an interest in entertainment types, like Jay Leno, Garth Brooks, Huey Lewis and the News. I'd even covered parts of some presidential campaigns with candidates like Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis. Most of that was during my college days. There weren't a lot of celebrities or high-powered political figures coming to towns like Hermiston, Klamath Falls and Coos Bay, Ore., or Porterville, Calif. Although I did get a chance to interview former U.S. Sens. Bob Packwood and Mark Hatfield along the way.

But when I was in Victorville, Calif., we did have our own resident celebrities there. Former Republic Pictures singing cowboy and 1950s TV stars Roy Rogers and Dale Evans had their museum in Victorville, just down the street from the newspaper office and they lived in nearby Apple Valley. A few other celebrities came to town once in a while for the San Bernardino County Fair, or to visit the Rogers.

And earlier this year, just down the road from my old stomping grounds in Porterville, I did cover actor-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's visit to the World Ag Expo in Tulare.

But when I moved to Palm Springs in 1999, it was not unusual to run into a well known person while out for dinner or walking downtown. Lots of well-known and well-to-do folk were at least part-time residents of one wealthy enclave of the Coachella Valley or another.

For much of my early tenure at the Palm Springs paper, we referred to President and Mrs. Ford as part-time residents of Rancho Mirage. It was President Ford himself who set us straight on that. During a meeting with our editorial board he told us that he was a full-time resident of Rancho Mirage, thank you very much. He and his wife considered Rancho Mirage their permanent home and they maintained a vacation home in Colorado.

Ford was in his late 80s at the time of the interview on May 1, 2002, but it was remarkable to me how attuned he remained to domestic issues and foreign affairs. His speech was slurred ever so slightly at times, an apparently holdover from the stroke he had suffered at the Republican National Convention in 2000. But if his tongue was slowed slightly, his mind had not been. He talked to our editorial board about a wide range of issues, from our own sports section, which he said he read daily and told us he'd like to see more coverage of some sports outside the Pac-10, to national and global security in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. I was impressed and awed by Ford. I would even say I was inspired by him. I was honored to get an opportunity to meet him and to shake his hand. I keep a photo of that meeting with the former president in my home office and another photo of that meeting is on a file cabinet in my office at Capital Press too.

I was proud to have played a role in getting Ford to come speak to The Desert Sun's editorial board. The idea was hatched one day when I was talking to then editorial page editor Cindy Uken. I had been on the editorial board for about two years, and Cindy had directed the editorial page for more than a year. We talked about what we would like to see and do with that editorial board. There were no shortage of people who wanted to meet with our board. We had guests at almost every weekly meeting. We were talking about how we would like to be more influential in state, even national, matters. And I said something about how we should take advantage of all the influential people who lived in our community and invite more of them to come speak to us. "Wouldn't it be great to have someone like President Ford come meet with us periodically on major issues…," was something close to what I uttered. I think I threw out a few more names too, like Lee Iacocca perhaps to talk on business issues. Who knows who else I mentioned. But the idea took root. And Cindy made it happen. And before we knew it, President Ford had accepted our invitation to meet with our editorial board. In many ways it was sort of my last hurrah on the editorial board. I came off the board a short time later. But what a way to go out, after having a chance to meet a former president.

Ford was a key figured in helping the nation recover from some of the most devastating crisis of the 1960s and 1970s. He served on the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President Kennedy. He was appointed vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace after being charged with tax evasion. Ford became president when Richard Nixon's role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up led to his resignation. Ford also oversaw the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from the long conflict in Vietnam.

Ford expressed no regrets for his pardon of Nixon, which was highly controversial at the time and probably cost him any shot at being elected outright in 1976. He firmly believed he did the right thing for the nation.
As he said after taking the oath of office on Aug. 9, 1974:

" My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. ... As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate."

Ford was honored in May 2001 with a "Profile in Courage" award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation for his bold step in pardoning his predecessor.

In all, he spent less than three years in the Oval Office, but it was a key three years in our nation's history. He and his wife Betty also contributed to countless causes in my former Coachella Valley home and in communities around the country where they lived or had ties. Betty Ford herself has displayed remarkable courage for her public disclosures of her battles with chemical dependency and breast cancer. Her courage and her strength in admitting her weaknesses has given many people, women in particular, strength to fight their own battles with hope and courage.

As a fellow native Nebraskan, I was honored to meet President Ford and to shake his hand on that day four and a half years ago. I left that meeting with a much greater appreciation for the man as a leader and statesman. I join a grateful nation in grieving for him and offer my own humble condolences to the Ford family. Thank you for sharing your husband, father and grandfather with the nation.

Rest in peace, Mr. President.

Related Stories:
• President Ford dies at 93
• President Ford recalled as excellent administrator and respected leader

Related Links:
• Read Cindy Uken's column on President Ford